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Books: The Perfect Player
Janet Green
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Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy
by Sandy Koufax
HarperCollins
304pp.;$23.95
In 1965, Sndy Koufax chose not to pitch in the biggest game of any major league pitcher�s career -- the opening day of the World Series. He refused to take the ball because the game fell on Yom Kippur. With that decision, he wrote his name in American Jewish history and became the man most Jewish American mothers wanted their sons to be and their daughters to marry.
Jane Leavy, a former sports-writer for the Washington Post, and now a novelist, has assembled a complex and detailed portrait of this man, still famous even though more than 35 years have passed since he threw his last pitch. She never saw him play and confesses to being a Yankee fan -- the Yankees being the archrivals of Koufax�s Dodgers. However she readily acknowledges that it is because of Sandy Koufax that she doesn�t work on the High Holy Days.
Leavy has used three of Sandy Koufax�s most memorable games to frame her biography of the elusive southpaw. Two of these he pitched and won, including a "perfect game" against the Chicago Cubs and -- one month later -- the final and deciding 7th game of the 1965 World Series. But he is best known for the game in which he refused to take the ball.
In making that gesture, Sandy Koufax became known as a man who understood the real priorities in life and was willing to stand up for them. Major newspapers across the country carried the story. Phil Silvers, the comedian, reported that the New York Yankees all signed a petition calling for Yom Kippur to be permanently moved to the first weekend in October. And Don Drysdale, the ace Dodger pitcher who replaced Koufax on that important day and gave up seven runs, said to manager Walter Alston, when he came to take him out of the game, "Hey Skip, I bet you wish I was Jewish too."
Sandy Koufax�s decision was permanently etched in the book of the Jewish experience in America. Not since Hank Greenberg hit a home run for the Detroit Tigers on Rosh Ha-shanah in the 1934 pennant race, and the Detroit Free Press had a headline the next day which read: "And so to you Mr. Greenberg, the Tiger fans say, �Leshono tovo tikosayvu!�" had American popular culture so embraced and acknowledged the place of Jews in America. As Jane Leavy reminds us, when Joe Lieberman became the first Jew to receive the nomination for vice president, The New York Times called him "the Sandy Koufax of politics."
Sanford Braun was born December 30, 1935. When he was 9, his mother married Irving Koufax, and he is the man Sandy called father. The household was not an observant one, and Sandy didn�t even have a bar mitzvah. As a friend said to Leavy, "You are Jewish because you were born Jewish. Because you were from Brooklyn." Sandy�s grandfather, Max Lichtenstein, loved the Yiddish theater and had a strong influence on the man Sandy became. Their Bensonhurst neighborhood was full of immigrant enthusiasm, energy and talent. Comedian Buddy Hackett lived next door, Fred Wilpon, today the owner of the New York Mets, was his best friend, and lawyer Alan Dershowitz lived down the street.
Sandy loved basketball, and when he began his studies at the University of Cincinnati, he joined the basketball team. At the end of his freshman year, he tried out for the baseball team, and after one year the scouts began to approach him. He signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955.
The "perfect game" started out like any other. It was September 9, 1965. The Chicago Cubs were in Los Angeles, where the Dodgers had moved in 1958. Officially, in Major League baseball, from 1880 to the present, there have been only 16 "perfect games" -- nine innings with no hits, walks, errors, hit batters or base runners. By looking at the events of each inning, Leavy describes the skill and strategy common to all baseball games but which reached a peak on that warm evening in Dodger Stadium.
As the game unfolded, the actions and emotions of fans, opposing players and media became identical -- awestruck at witnessing something that seemed virtually impossible. Leavy describes the response of Sandy�s teammates, who were typically superstitious ballplayers. Many players eat exactly the same meal before each game or never step on a baseline when taking the field to play. But as the possibility of a perfect game became apparent that night, these routines became almost comical. Each player repeated exactly what he was doing the inning before. He sat in the same place on the bench, drank the same beverage, and never, never spoke to the pitcher. First-time observers were shocked to see the pitcher sitting isolated in a crowded dugout, his teammates leaving space around him as if he had a communicable disease. It wasn�t until the 8th inning that Dodger radio broadcaster Vin Scully told his listeners that they should call anyone they knew who was a baseball fan "just to make sure he�s at the other end of this thing tonight."
Yet for all his fame and glory, Sandy Koufax remains an elusive figure. Today, Koufax lives in Florida, spending his days playing golf with a few friends. Occasionally, he shows up at Dodgertown, the spring-training facility of his former team. He was married twice, but neither union lasted, and he has no children. His connection to baseball mostly takes the form of a few talks he gives on his favorite topic -- the physics and mechanics of pitching. Once or twice a year he signs autographs at a card show, but he seldom gives interviews.
Only through the intercession of Koufax�s childhood friend Fred Wilpon, and Donald Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, was Jane Leavy able to reach him and tell him about the book she wanted to write. He gave her only one interview, but he did give his friends permission to speak with the author. So, while this book is not an authorized biography, Leavy has interviewed hundreds of teammates, friends and acquaintances. Nonetheless, the feeling of distance from her subject is never quite overcome.
Leavy makes the case that he is a decent, modest man who guards his privacy, but who happened to come of age at the same time television was beginning to create a new type of celebrity for elite sports figures.
Koufax�s brief career, which ended at age 31, was so remarkable that in 1972 he was the youngest player to be elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame. At the 1966 press conference in which he announced his retirement, he talked about the difficulty of keeping his arm going, saying: "I don�t regret one minute of the last 12 years, but I think I would regret one year that was too many."
At the end of the book we know him best from the one quote taken from that sole interview Koufax did give the author. As she says, "It is the one question I needed to have answered before I could write the book." "Yes," said Sandy, "I absolutely loved it."
Janet Green is a baseball fan (and communications consultant) from Boston, Massachusetts.
December 30, 2002
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